Books: “Educated” and “Soonish” are picks at area universities

Summer is a great time to catch up on books people will be talking about this fall.

The University of Idaho and Washington State University have both chosen their Common Read books for incoming freshmen for the 2018-19 school year.

“Educated: A Memoir,” by Idaho native Tara Westover is the University of Idaho’s selection. Westover will speak at 7 p.m. Sept. 10 in the International Ballroom of the Bruce M. Pitman Center at UI.

Westover was born into a Mormon fundamentalist family in southern Idaho. Her mother was a self-taught herbalist, and her father didn’t believe in public education, putting his children to work in his junkyard. When she was 17, she decided she wanted to go to college, an against-the-odds journey that led her to Trinity College in Cambridge and Harvard University.

The 2017 book combines work by Kelly, a bioscientist and natural-science podcaster, and her husband, Zach, a cartoonist and creator of the popular webcomic “Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.” It is a humorous exploration of future scientific technologies, from robot swarms to 3D organ printing. Besides investigating how these ideas work, the authors consider the pros and cons and reasons the technologies have yet to happen. Events have yet to be announced.